Sigrid Lien & Hilde Wallem Nielssen – Adjusting the Lens

Describe your book

Adjusting the Lens: Indigenous Activism, Colonial Legacies and Photographic Heritage presents new research on colonial and decolonial photographic practices connected to a range of Indigenous communities in Northern and Arctic areas in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia. While many of the contributions to this field so far have centred on Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, and non-Western societies, this volume broadens the perspectives by including Northern Europe. It discusses the way photography has been integral to the assertion and maintenance of colonial power, but also how Indigenous artists and activist incorporate and re-appropriate colonial images in their practices. The book is born out of our own research on photographs from Sámi areas in Northern Norway, and collaborations and ongoing conversations with our contributors, scholars working in the field of Indigenous photography in other parts of the world. The different chapters may also work as an introduction to the field of Indigenous photography, both in a historical and a contemporary decolonial perspective. The introduction gives an overview of the theoretical development within this field, while the closing chapter discusses how Indigenous photographs challenges the conceptualisations and established analytical framework of academic photography studies. 

Why did you decide to publish it with a university press?

We wanted to highlight and draw attention to Indigenous photography as an emergent field of international scholarship, and a university press specialized on Indigenous studies, such as UBC Press, presented itself as an ideal venue for this purpose. 

Do you enjoy the writing process?

Absolutely. Not only were we triggered by the fascinating journeys of discovery into forgotten photography archives. We have also learned a lot from the multiple encounters with people along the way: Sámi curators, archivists, activists and artists – among others. We should perhaps also mention the immensely enjoyable collaborative writing process. As editors and co-writers, we have had many sessions with four-handed “piano-playing” on the computer keys. We have actually worked for a whole decade together like this without getting on each other’s nerves (yet). 

What book – for work or pleasure – would you recommend right now?

It is difficult to choose, but what about Dan Hicks’ book The Brutish Museum: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (Pluto Press 2020)? We appreciate the way Hicks, in this book, urges museums to undertake what he calls ‘forensic death-writing’ or ‘contemporary archaeology’. This involves excavating the recent past and the near-present in a forensic way, with the aim to uncover hidden truths at the scene of a crime, in other words, performing ‘a necrography.’ We have noticed, how in Scandinavia, as in the rest of Europe, such hidden truths increasingly reach the surface. Questions related to past colonial entanglements are more than ever on the agenda, in art education, art production as well as art historical research.  All this has created disturbance and hesitation, also in the museum landscape.

What is the best piece of advice anyone has ever given to you?

To avoid academic jargon and intellectual posing.

What piece of advice might you give to young academics looking to follow in your footsteps?

Choose a subject that really matters!

Who inspires you?

Strong, creative and open-minded woman academics!

What’s next?

We are currently working on a monography on photography from Sámi, based on our research on Sámi photography collections in European museums, and how these are activated in new ways in the present. We discuss the photographs in context of their production, distribution and uses, while again exploring tensions between their coloniality and decolonial practices. This is a project that we already have spent many years researching – and we are now looking forward to gather it all and get all these colourful and multi-facetted stories from our chest. So many pictures, so many stories!

Sigrid Lien is professor of art history and photography studies at the University of Bergen, Norway, and a leading authority on Norwegian photography. She has published extensively on modern and contemporary visual culture and is the author of the first extensive history of photography in Norway. 

Barbara Sjoholm is a translator of Norwegian and Danish, as well as the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, including Black Fox: A Life of Emilie Demant Hatt, Artist and Ethnographer.

Together, they are the editors of Adjusting the Lens: Indigenous Activism, Colonial Legacies, and Photographic Heritage (2021), published by UBC Press